If you don’t know him already, let me introduce you to the Oozlum Bird, probably the most useful metaphor possible for describing the world’s economic/political situation today.

“The oozlum bird, also spelt ouzelum, is a legendary creature found in Australian and British folk tales and legends. Some versions have it that, when startled, the bird will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up itself, disappearing completely, which adds to its rarity.

(…) A variant of the oozlum, possibly a mutation, is the weejy weejy bird, which has only one wing which causes it to fly in tighter, faster, smaller circles, until it disappears up its own fundament. — Wikipedia”

President Obama has presided over policies that have resulted in horrific war crimes against civilians (mainly children), a corrupt corporatocracy, and a dragnet surveillance state. Yet in a last ditch effort to preserve his legacy, he is pursuing policies that will pacify the public’s view of his crimes, which are no different than most other presidents before him regardless of political party. We must realize that he will only pursue legacy policies up to the point it upsets his masters in the banking industry that installed him in office, just like most other presidents since Woodrow Wilson.

The argument given by Obama apologists leading up to the 2012 re-election was that if we re-elected him he would end the wars, the surveillance, the corporate/banking collusion, and the erosion of the Bill of Rights.

The line must be drawn at dead children. This is the commander in chief and he had every ability to stop these atrocities in a timely fashion. It is very important that we as a people distinguish between pragmatism and compromise. Being against the bombing of children is not being a purist; it is being human.

In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.

The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.

Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.